We have some 9 tickets associated with next week’s sprint to nurture the new contributor guide to become better and more complete. This may end up becoming more, depending on the feedback during our retrospective.

You’ll notice that we’ve drawn a distinction between “casual” and “structured” contributions; we’ve had people complain about the high barrier to entry when pushed through the (rather professional) development platform of Phabricator, and all sorts of process involved.

This is likely to continue down this road; make it too easy for drive-by contributions, and keep the number of hoops to jump through and quantity of circles to run in limited to the contributions that are more structured and continuous.

Fix METADATA vs. ANNOTATEMORE

I’m happy to have fixed the scenario in which a client application connecting to a proxying frontend in a Cyrus IMAP Discrete Murder would obtain unsollicited ANNOTATION responses to a GETMETADATA request.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means, but do worry if you don’t understand why I’m happy to have fixed it.

Contributor Utility Packages

Furthering the thought of making it much easier, almost too easy, for people to contribute, we’ve made a repository available for the tooling we use, mainly the two packages for Phabricator: arcanist and libphutil. You can find more information here.

Sprints, Yeah?

As you can see in our Sprint 201610 burndown chart, most things get marked done on Thursdays and Fridays. This is caused by the new review process — only submitted, approved content and code changes get pushed during a merge window that starts on Thursday afternoon, and should finish, including complete delivery (i.e. packaging for Winterfell) before the retrospective starts (Friday afternoons).